Kyle Busch, driver of the #18 NOS Energy Drink Toyota, celebrates from on top of his car after winning the NASCAR Nationwide Series O’Reilly 300 at Texas Motor Speedway.

The 23-year old became the first driver to win from the pole position in 17 races in the NASCAR Nationwide Series at Texas Motor Speedway.

“It was for sure a phenomenal race car that helped me do that,” Busch said during a post-race interview in the media center. “We won – we love history – we won from the pole today, so that’s cool. We got that out of the way so now everybody else can qualify on the pole and win races here in the Nationwide Series”

There wasn’t another driver in the 43-car field that even came close to matching Busch’s record-breaking performance this afternoon on the 1.5-mile superspeedway.

Busch led 178 of the 200 laps, which is a new track record for the most laps led at TMS in a Nationwide Series race. The previous record of 174 laps was set by Busch at the O’Reilly Challenge here last November.

He also became the first driver in the series to win three consecutive races at Texas. His victory today was his 23rd in 143 Nationwide Series races and he is now seventh on the all-time win list in the series.

“It was a good day for us,” Busch said. “I wasn’t sure how good our car was here because of the wind playing havoc with us on Thursday, but we qualified on the pole and we beat that too.”

When the green flag was waved to start the race, Busch took off like a rocket. He opened up a marginal lead on the field and quickly began lapping cars. By Lap 55, there were only 11 cars on the lead lap. Three drivers got their lap back and only 14 drivers were left on the lead lap at the finish.

Courtesy photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for Texas Motor Speedway

Tony Stewart, driver of the #33 Armor All Chevrolet, finished second in the O’Reilly 300 NASCAR Nationwide Series race at Texas Motor Speedway.

The only driver at the end of the race that had a chance of catch Busch was Tony Stewart.

Stewart, driving the No. 33 Armor All Chevrolet that is owned by Kevin Harvick Racing, finished the race 1.447 seconds behind Busch in second. It was Stewart’s fourth top-10 finish in six races at Texas and his second top-10 finish in 2009.

“I thought that if we could get to the top three that would be pretty good,” Stewart said. “Once we got to second and starting pulling away from Brad (Keselowski) we had the luxury of kind of backing off our pace just in case we got the green-white-checkered. We were far enough behind Kyle that we weren’t going to catch him with the remaining laps left. If we got the caution and didn’t abuse the tires, then we might have been able to catch him if the caution came out. Kyle was just bad fast all day no doubt.”